U.S. Stands With an Ally, Eager for China to Join the Line

MARK LANDLER

Thursday

May 27, 2010 at 5:11 AM

American officials say there is disagreement within China about how to respond to North Korea, pitting civilian party leaders against the military.

SEOUL, South Korea — When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday declared America’s solidarity with South Korea in its mounting confrontation with North Korea, she had more than a domestic audience in mind: she was also speaking to the Chinese.

“We believe it’s in everyone’s interest, including China, to make a persuasive case for North Korea to change direction,” Mrs. Clinton said after meeting South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak.

She implored the Chinese to study the 400-page South Korean government report that concluded that the North torpedoed a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors. And she promoted a visit to Seoul on Friday by the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, which American officials hope will open the door for Beijing’s support of a United Nations resolution condemning the attack.

The American effort to muster Chinese backing for South Korea is emerging as a test case for how the Obama administration handles China, a nation that is more assertive on the world stage, yet possessed of some of the same insecurities and internal divisions that have long preoccupied its leaders.

While China’s decision-making on core foreign policy issues tends to be secretive, American officials said they had picked up hints that there was some disagreement within the leadership about how to respond to North Korea’s behavior, pitting civilian party leaders against the military.

The debate surfaced last year after North Korea tested a nuclear device, American officials said, and has accelerated since the attack on the South Korean ship, the Cheonan. Chinese civilian leaders have expressed growing puzzlement and anger about the North’s behavior, these officials said, while military officials tend to see the North’s moves as more defensible given the threat North Korea perceives from the United States.

China and North Korea, onetime ideological allies, conduct their relations through their ruling parties. But the two militaries, which fought together against the United States and South Korea during the Korean War, have their own close ties.

“There is profound frustration with North Korean behavior and with the way in which it complicates China’s own security calculations,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The United States and South Korea, for example, have agreed to conduct joint naval exercises in the waters off the Korean Peninsula. Their troops are working together to increase military preparedness. Japan dropped its resistance to a deal to relocate a Marine Corps air base on the island of Okinawa, driven in part by fears of hostility in its neighborhood.

These developments were noticed in Beijing, which views them as an impediment to its own ambitions, officials said.

Recognizing the influential role of the Chinese military, the United States is working to restore military-to-military contacts. They were cut off by China this year after Washington sold weapons to Taiwan, and military officials still seem chilly toward the United States.

The only discordant note at the American-Chinese meetings, an official said, was a presentation by an officer of the People’s Liberation Army, in which he blamed Washington for everything that had gone wrong between the two countries and credited Beijing for everything that had gone right. American officials complained afterward to their Chinese hosts.

To emphasize the importance the United States places on military exchanges, Mrs. Clinton brought along Adm. Robert F. Willard, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, who met with senior military officials and was introduced by Mrs. Clinton to President Hu Jintao.

Mrs. Clinton also pushed hard to change China’s aloof posture on the Korean standoff. She spent many hours in meetings with Chinese leaders, going over the fine points of the South Korean report and brandishing other evidence of the North’s involvement.

She showered public praise on President Lee to remind Beijing of South Korea’s economic heft and strategic importance. And she is trying to corral support from Russia, which has often influenced how China votes in the United Nations Security Council, where both countries hold vetoes.

It is a formula that administration officials said they used with some success in overcoming China’s initial opposition to United Nations sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. But as with Iran, the process is likely to be slow, grinding and prone to setbacks.

The Iran resolution has taken months longer than the administration would have liked, and even now, China’s support is not a sure thing. Administration officials suggested Wednesday that it would make sense to wait for the Iran sanctions to be passed before introducing a resolution on North Korea, to avoid overloading the diplomatic circuits at the Security Council.

The Chinese have not yet shown any readiness to accept that the North sank the ship. To the extent that they alluded to the crisis at all, it was to appeal for calm.

Given China’s reluctance to single out North Korea, officials said it was unrealistic to expect that Mrs. Clinton could break down their resistance in a couple of days. That is likely to take days or even weeks of talks.

Meanwhile, the United States signaled that it stood firmly behind President Lee, a former business executive who has the difficult task of responding to North Korea’s attack without allowing the situation to spiral out of control. Mrs. Clinton described him several times as statesmanlike.

“We will stand with you in this difficult hour, and we stand with you always,” Mrs. Clinton said during a four-hour stop in Seoul.

Despite all the hurdles, South Korean officials seemed confident that they would be able to win broad international backing. “China and Russia, of course, will take time, I’m sure,” said the foreign minister, Yu Myung-hwan. “But they will not be able to deny the facts.”

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